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Nonprofit collaboration in the cloud

The Brief?This post comes from the RelSci 5, our weekly newsletter for and about nonprofit leaders. Its curated articles and insights revolve around a different theme each week and will help you do your job better. This week’s theme is Across the aisle.

1.Cross-sector lessons. Nonprofits, whether new or established, are a lot like for-profit startups: full of passionate, bright people with a lot of creative ideas who are looking to make a difference. In fact, NPOs could stand to learn a thing or two about flexibility, branding and the marketplace of skills from fledgling companies. Foosball table not required.

2. To a T. When building your team, take a page from Orbitz Worldwide CEO Barney Harford and look for “T-shaped” staffers. These are people who have deep knowledge in their own field and a broad curiosity about its application in terms of the organization as a whole. Think “big-picture type” meets “subject matter expert.” Enough of these, says Harford, and you’ll “get a force multiplier in terms of innovation.”

4. Cloudy days ahead. More and more companies are moving to cloud-based computing, which has changed the way coworkers interact. Face-to-face collaboration, long the bedrock of coworker relationships, is fading away. For those who prize a human touch,is this necessarily a bad thing?

5. Speaking of the cloud. The Pew Research Center has released the results of a new study, which found that social media users are much less likely to talk about controversial issues in person than non-social media users. So, if you’re looking to host a public forum anytime soon and you want a real discussion, invite those two people you know who aren’t on Facebook yet.

Nonprofit collaboration in the cloud was last modified: August 29th, 2014 by user